The Crane Game

Perfection, Honor, Glory. The Crane

Mura Sabishii Toshi

The Lonely Shore City is a key city in the Crane Clan’s trading and supply routes. Lying south of the Spine of the World mountains, the main roads out of it lead to Wolf City and the Daidoji Training Grounds. Most trade here comes from Samui Kaze Toshi, but that is strictly nautical, making it a flourishing port town. If someone wants to travel north they can walk hundreds of miles on foot or just commission a ship from here, arriving at Samui Kaze Toshi within a week.

It’s a walled city with 3 gated entrances. One, used primarily for economic traffic, is located in the Warehouse District by the Docks. The second is used exclusively by eta (and those few others who don’t mind mingling with eta) to travel between the eta village outside the walls and the city-proper. This gate is located on the border of the Warehouse District and the Peasant District. The third gate is situated in the Foreign District (where foreign means anything other than Crane Clan), which joins the Peasant District and Nobles District.

The city’s low point is the Warehouse District, which includes the docks on the mouth of the River of Gold. The Mantis are strongly represented here in the dockside inns and sake houses. Street upon street of stoutly-built warehouses dominate the district; many of them are guarded. It’s difficult to find establishments of the proper quality for an upstanding samurai here.

Rising on a gentle slope, the Peasant District borders the Warehouse District. Close by the border you’ll find the working class peasants and craftsmen of the city. Working your way up the hillside you find the homes and leisure establishments of more affluent craftsmen and workers. Reaching the border of the Peasant District and Foreign District, you are among the estates of the city’s many rich peasant merchants.

The Foreign District has the city’s greatest concentration of inns, tea houses, geisha houses, and sake houses. It’s your best bet to find transient members of other clans visiting the city and often your best bet to find the city’s resident samurai when relaxing. The quality of these establishments varies from no-frills and respectable to truly opulent.

The Nobles District is the high point of the city, with the governor’s estate the absolute highest. The Crab, Mantis, and Lion clans have embassies here. There are no inns in this district, but there are a handful of tea houses and geisha houses for those samurai looking to be a bit more discreet than the business of the Foreign District. The Crane Clan maintains a handful of estates here, empty, for the use of visiting diplomats from the clans without permanent representation in the city.

The eta village is located outside the city walls. The sizeable number of eta necessary to keep a city the size of Mura Sabishii Toshi operating live here among the tanneries, crematoria, and night soil processors.

The city is unusual in one respect. There is no Temple District here. Instead, the city’s shrines and temples are scattered amongst all the city’s districts.

Public parks are found throughout the city. They’re most numerous in the Peasant and Noble Districts and least numerous in the Warehouse and Foreign Districts, with the Warehouse District having only 2 small green spaces.